My original idea for this story was as a Terminator/RWBY crossover, but I want people to actually read it so I rethought it as just RWYB lol. Think it's turned out cooler this way.

"Um… hello," Omsk said. "How you feeling Leif?"

"Pretty good actually, thanks Omsk!" The youth stretched his arms and yawned. "Man, I must have been asleep for a while." He glanced around the cave again. "Where are we?"

"At the new facility," Omsk said. "Haha…" She quickly tapped sweaty fingers against the scroll-pad.

"Oh great!" Leif replied, seemingly not curious as to why an advanced Atlas lab would look like the inside of an abandoned mine.

"But why does it look like we're inside an abandoned mine?" Perhaps he was curious.

"It's just the aesthetic," Omsk replied, rushing to start the shutdown process. She mixed up her sixes and her nines as she tried to input another password. "You know, like fun kind of environment, haha."

"That's cool," Leif replied. "Did you fix me up?"

"Good as new."

"Thanks!"

"No problem…"

"But, uh, who's that?" Leif pointed to the other man in the room.

Tyrian waved from his seat on the table. "The name is Tyrian Callows!" He laughed and let his scorpion tail peer up above his shoulder.

Omsk typed out a correct passcode.

"That's cool!" Leif said. "Is that tail real?"

She stared angrily at a loading bar.

"Born with it."

She skimmed a spreadsheet of variables to make sure a shutoff would not corrupt his system.

"Oh cool! I was never born. Not really." He shrugged and smiled. "But hey, I still got a birthday!"

Omsk grumbled and tapped her nails against the pad's screen as yet another loading bar blocked her progress.

"Really? did you get cake?" Tyrian asked.

Omsk found the last screen she needed.

"Yeah! Penny baked it for me." Leif's warm smile was the kind that only an especially cherished memory can inspire. "She even used frosting to try and make a robot on top of it; that was super cute."

Omsk wiped the sweat from her fingers on her shaggy wool scarf.

"What flavor was it?"

Omsk tapped on the pad again.

"Yellow! With whipped cream frosting."

She cursed a typo.

"Ah, that sounds delicious. Simple but excellent."

"For sure!" Leif looked down at the technician frantically scrolling through the last lines of code she needed to confirm. "Hey Omsk, does Penny know I—"

Omsk smacked a shaking finger against one more button. Leif convulsed for a second, then became still as a corpse and collapsed back into his sarcophagus. His eyes fizzled again with multicolored, grainy skin that receded and revealed cameras.

"Ha! Friendlier than I thought," Tyrian said.

Omsk let out a deep breath and heaved raggedly; unbeknownst to herself, she had been holding her breath.

"Yeah"– she gulped for air –"it's pretty annoying."

"Pretty gullible too, hehe."

"One thing we've been working on is how naïve they can be," Omsk said. She sank onto the cold planks of the truck bed and let out another breath. "They're only a couple years old, technically. And they've had pretty sheltered existences in the labs." She pulled a mitten back over her freezing and exposed hand. "But that means they're pretty easy to manipulate, and that's a bonus for us."

"Oh definitely, hehe." Tyrian giggled, loving the thought of an innocent plaything to toy with.

"And yes, it's not exactly the best at social interaction. As it turns out one of the most complicated things in existence is people talking to each other. Highly advanced meat computers communicating by utilizing a set of thousands of words that can be arranged in uncountable ways about an untold number of things. That's hard to teach. Heck, even normal people take a couple decades to get a hang of it."

"People tell me that I'm still not good at it!"

"I can't imagine why…" Omsk patted her rosy cheeks with her cold mittens. "Now that that's over with, we can properly get him ready." She grabbed the scroll-pad again and took the mitten off her other hand, giving the cold one she just used a break.

"You reprogramming him?" Tyrian said. He rubbed his hands together and breathed hot air onto them. Then he rested his palms on the heater.

"Not really," Omsk replied. "I'm wiping his memory. Well, I'm wiping the specific higher memory; have to keep the latent stuff."

"Higher? Latent?" Tyrian scoffed. "Sounds complicated, just whack him in the head a few times. That works for normal people, hehe."

"If only." She flipped through the familiar menus on her pad. "We have to be careful here. What we classify in his storage as "higher memory" is all the stuff like what year it is, what his name is, where he is and whatnot. That's opposed to his latent memory, where all the automatic stuff is stored. That's where his ability to speak, read, write, fight and so on are. If we delete all of it, then we'll just have a piece of metal." She flicked through a menu and started reading through the vast stores of his higher memory. "Humans have a similar kind of memory division."

"Yeah, sounds like we want to give him a classic case of amnesia." He smiled and tapped out a staccato beat with his fingers against the heater. "Then it will be a piece of cake to manipulate him, right?"

"Exactly," Omsk said. She stopped scrolling through the heaps of code and smirked. "Like right here, I'm looking at the file that contains all the memories for that birthday party he talked about." She tapped a trashcan symbol with a nasty chuckle. "And there it goes. Gone forever."

"That so?" Tyrian hopped off the heater and ambled to the truck. He peeked up to the scroll-pad. "You're just erasing all his memories?"

"Yup."

"Can I?" Tyrian reached out a spindly hand, wanting to get in on the fun.

"Go for it." She scrolled through the long list of dates, some of which had labels, and pointed at one. "This right here is his first time being let out the lab. I believe he got to go sledding, but that was a little before I came onto the project."

"Ohhh hehehe." Tyrian wagged a finger and circled it through the air as Omsk showed him the trashcan button and held up the pad for him. "Ha!" He jammed his finger down onto the delete icon. The file disappeared.

"Fun, yeah?" Omsk asked.

"I feel devious!" Tyrian rubbed his hands together like a child who had just stolen a piece of gum from the grocery store and now wanted to steal more. "Lemme do it again!"

"Let's take turns," Omsk said as she kept scrolling through.

The last month of his life. Gone.

The first time he watched a horror movie. Gone.

The first time he practiced swimming. Gone.

The last conversation he had had with Pietro. Gone.

Cooking and ruining a dish of pasta with Penny. Gone.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

"Heh, I saved this for last," Omsk said after they indulged in the little game for the better part of an hour, deleting vast tracts of his life. They had chiseled away at and annihilated practically his entire experience with living. "This one is his first time meeting Penny."

She pointed at the file's title: Happy Day! Met friend Penny!

"Just who is Penny anyway?" Tyrian asked.

"Another brat like him, just as annoying." She highlighted the entry. "Another fancy weapon playing at being a person." She tapped the trashcan icon with a smirk, erasing the precious memory from existence.

And just like that, between giggles, they had swept away his life into a void from which return was impossible.

"Oh, I feel devious indeed!" Tyrian said while clapping his hands together.

"Yeah, that was fun," Omsk admitted. Perhaps her partner in crime wasn't so bad?

"Although, hehe, I must admit that I still love ending real life personally with my own hands. There's something neat about this, but nothing will beat looking at the light fade from someone's eyes…"

No, he was that bad.

"Alright, now comes the boring part," Omsk said. She was relieved that those words made Tyrian sneer and back away to his heater once more. "Just need to comb through all his latent memory and make sure everything's in order and there's nothing that could cause us problems buried in there. It's all pretty uniform, but still need to check it." She sighed.

Omsk cracked her neck and popped each one of her fingers. This would take a while.

A while it did take. After leaving just the necessities of high memory, Omsk had begun the long and arduous process of looking through and checking file after file and line after line of code in certain portions of the latent memory stores where perhaps some things from the higher memory might have been transferred.

She had spent ten hours doing it, during which time she had consumed fifteen pieces of jerky that they had stored in the cave beforehand, drank three water bottles similarly stored, taken two short forays outside the mine to relieve herself and had seized twenty or so minutes to relax by the heater after Tyrian fell asleep.

She shivered, yawned, rubbed her red eyes and skimmed over the last few files that needed to be double-checked. She sighed and pressed an aching, cold finger against yet another folder icon. Not once thus far had she found anything out of the ordinary. To say that the utter uselessness of the mind-numbing work had somewhat demoralized her would be an understatement.

Then, however, she saw a recently added and relatively small file that looked somewhat unique. It was labeled simply: Edelweiss

She tapped on it, blearily peering at the code and yawning again. She squinted and made out certain commands that had to do with facial recognition and appropriate responses.

Screw this. It's just some little tweak they added to make him less socially awkward or something.

Omsk saved her work without further scrutinizing the file and set the pad back down on the android's inert form. For all this time, the lifeless camera eyes had stared straight up and into nothing. The thing was oblivious to its own deconstruction.

Omsk stumbled off of the truck and meandered over to the heater. The cold and her exhaustion made her feel like a cheap steak that had been left for a day too long in the fridge. Tyrian snored loudly and snuggled up in a blanket beside the heater. Omsk took her own blanket and curled up on the other side.

She fell asleep in seconds.

Tyrian snored loudly. "Guhhhhh." It was not the normal sort of snoring; no, his came up from the gullet like a toad's croak that had been snatched from the air and rung out like a wet towel.

Omsk had tried to go back to sleep. She really had. After ten minutes, however, she realized just how truly futile that would be. Instead, she shivered and reluctantly got to her feet. Keeping her blanket wrapped tightly around herself, she shuffled across the cold dirt floor and climbed back up into the truck. The robot had not moved since she left.

Omsk picked up the scroll-pad again, flipped it on and browsed the many variables open to her. She peered down at the android again, meeting it right in its vacant eyes. It didn't feel like looking at a person, or even a corpse. She looked at a thing. It made her skin crawl.

"What's the plan now?" Tyrian asked from right beside her.

She shrieked. "Ohgodswhat!" Omsk surged to the side and fell right down into the tough truck bed beside the sarcophagus.

"Ha! Hahahaha!" Tyrian let out a gout of laughs from his belly. "Oh you're too easy!"

Omsk would harbor a special grudge against Watts for leaving her with this psycho.

"Ugh," she muttered. Grabbing onto the edge of the sarcophagus with her purple mittens, she hauled herself back up with a huff. Brushing a few splinters off her furry coat, she cast Tyrian a weak little glare before picking up the scroll-pad again. "I was just going to work on his new identity."

"Ohhhh, that sounds interesting!" Tyrian wiggled with delight like a child who had just been told they were going to a candy store. "Are you going to skin him?"

"Um, what?"

"Skin him—you know, to change his appearance."

"Oh, he can do that just fine on his own. Let me show you."

Omsk pulled of a mitten with her teeth—

"Why not just use this?" Tyrian asked, holding up a black stylus.

"What."

"Then you could just, well, keep those stupid mittens on and use this."

"I… where did you find that?"

"It was in the same compartment that the scroll-pad was in."

"Well."

She put her mitten back on and—

"Whoops," Tyrian said as he chucked the stylus over his shoulder. It landed somewhere in the gravel, clattering in the dark.

Omsk's face was as cold as the frozen stones around them. "Why. Just why."

Tyrian smirked and shared a juvenile chuckle with himself. Omsk pulled off a mitten again rather than face the indignity of searching for the stylus.

She pulled open a screen full of sliders. "Ever played a video game with a lot of character customization?"

"Like Miryks?" he asked, referring of course to the incredibly popular RPG that had taken Remnant by storm.

"Yes. Now imagine that you downloaded all the mods that massively expand the customization options."

"Oh, fun!"

"Fun indeed." She flicked a few sliders on her scroll-pad to their extreme ends. The robot's form shifted then, with all the visible skin rippling, sizzling and changing color.

The android's skin became as purple as a ripe eggplant; his hair became cotton candy pink; his eyes became such an absurd neon yellow that they looked like two gumballs that had popped out of a gumball machine at some garish children's playhouse.

That gave Tyrion a good laugh, and even if he was an asshole, Omsk found things funny enough to chuckle as well. After a second, however, a brief and uncomfortable thought came to her. Was she playing with a corpse?

Nah, this thing was just that: a thing.

"But we need to make a reasonable new form for him," Omsk said. "After all, he has to fit into society as a normal human. Can't exactly do that looking like a clown."

"Have you seen the way some of those hunters dress?"

Omsk didn't really have a good refute for that.

"Well, we shouldn't take any chances," she said after a pause. "Let's just make a fairly average sort of guy." She tapped a button that reset the android's physical features. It even made his crystal blue eyes reform over the cameras; however, they still conveyed no sense of life, looking more like glass eyes than real ones.

"Let's do this." She fixed a slider and turned the android's hair from black to blonde. "And this." She nudged another slider and gave him slightly more of a tan, so that at least he no longer looked outright pale. "How about this?" She changed a few number values and the skin on his face shifted. The cheekbones rose. The nose sharpened a little. "Let's tinker with that…" She fiddled with the various values, contorting his face gradually until a completely different boy lay in the sarcophagus. "And why not, let's keep the eyes. Blue goes well with blonde."

"That they do…" Tyrian muttered. He looked with piqued curiosity at the robot. "How does that happen? What's even the science behind it?"

"Light dust particles infused to specific metal alloys that the android can command via signals from its internal processor," Omsk replied. "To put it simply."

"Right… simply…"

"Now we just need a name." She tapped the scroll-pad listlessly. "What to do…"

"How about Conan the Conqueror?"

"That's a no."

"Geoff Lazer?"

"Also no."

"Streetlamp Salad?"

"What the?"

Omsk shook her head, reeling from just how exasperated the psycho could make her so quickly. "No, let me just use this." She pulled up her scroll and typed into the search engine. "Baby name generator…"

"Really?"

Ignoring him, Omsk selected a generator and hit go. "Valerie? No, baby name generator for boys."

"No, look up cool baby name generator for boys."

Omsk tapped on a different website's generator. "How about Nicholas?"

"Nope."

"Edward?"

"Nah."

"Alfonzo?"

"Does he look like an Alfonzo to you?"

"How about Jaune?"

"Jaune? Hmmmm." Tyrian tapped his stinger on the top of his head, bonking the thoughts in his skull. "I like that one."

"Yeah?"

"It sounds like John, but it isn't, and that's a little annoying to me. Hehe, it's sort of funny."

"Of course…" Omsk just rolled her eyes.

"It really rolls off the tongue; the ladies will love it!"

"Right… well it's fine enough, so alright. Now for the last name." She tapped the generator again.

"You can't do that!" Tyrian protested. "Someone having a first name for their last name? That's just ridiculous!"

"Oh, now you decide to stand up for normalcy?"

"Just pick something else, it doesn't have to be smart," he said with a shrug. Then he peered around the mine. "Like look there, at that." He pointed to a dilapidated machine with a rusty and crooked crane arm. On its side, in faint white paint, one could just barely make out faded letters: Automatic Refill Contraption

"A-R-C," Tyrian said, spelling out the first letters of each word. "Arc."

"Arc? Jaune Arc?" Omsk tapped a mitten against her chin, thinking it over. "It has a ring to it, for sure. But does it fit the color rule?"

"The color what?"

"You know, the color rule. In the Great War, some people tried to destroy art and self-expression or something like that so now you're supposed to name everybody after a color?"

"What?"

"Yeah, you don't know?"

Tyrian patted his chest as if someone had just strapped a bomb onto him. "Wait, is my name something about colors?"

"I suppose it has to be?"

"Is Tyrian a color?"

"It's a snail that makes purple, right?"

"I'm named after a snail?"

"Heh, I guess you are." Omsk smirked.

Tyrian jammed an accusing finger in her face. "Yeah? Well, what about your name?"

"I…" Omsk blinked. She opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water. "I… well… my full name is Novos Omsk."

"Are those colors?"

"I think they allude to a couple of arctic cities… so I guess they're supposed to reference grey? Or something? Maybe white?"

"And what about General Ironwood? Hm? Does that name automatically conjure an image of some color?"

"Well—"

"Or Ozpin? Or Glynda Goodwitch? Or Salem?"

"Who's Salem?"

"Never mind!" Tyrian spat.

"Uh… okay." Omsk shuffled away from him. "I guess Jaune Arc is fine." She looked back down at the scroll-pad and typed in the name under a notes page she had opened. "Maybe it means a color in some other language."

"Or maybe—"

Whatever (probably cursed) thing Tyrian had been about to say, the world will never know. For Omsk tapped the power button again. Once more, the android sat up like a crankshaft fresh from the assembly line. It blinked and looked around at the cave it was in, then settled on looking at Omsk and Tyrian. He smiled.

"Salutations!"

"Who taught you to say that?" Omsk asked.

"I have no idea!"

"Well, it seems that got assimilated into your latent memories after being classified as a social interaction worth storing," Omsk said, tapping her chin and ruminating on the complicated program processes that resulted in his current state.

"Um, sure!" the android replied.

"Do you know your name?" Tyrian asked, excited by the new and odd conversation.

"Um, I actually don't," the android said, sheepishly scratching his cheek. "Do you?"

"Technically, your name is D-252," Omsk said.

"Great, that's me!" said D-252.

"But now your name is Jaune Arc."

"Great, that's me!" said Jaune Arc.

"Hm." Omsk crossed her arms, unimpressed. "We really do need to keep working on your higher memory now and get you acting a bit more normal."

"Sure thing, that sounds fun!"

"Sadly, the personality's stayed the same…" she murmured.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, flipping through the various settings on the scroll-pad.

Jaune looked down at himself, wearing a simple set of white felt clothes and stuck in a crate. He also curiously followed the cable leading from the scroll-pad up to his own temple. He touched it.

"Don't touch that."

"Oh, sorry…" Jaune tapped his fingers together. "Um, what am I?"

"You're a robot."

"Oh, cool!"

"More specifically, a robot spy."

"Even cooler!"

"Yes," Omsk said, choosing her words carefully as she monitored his "brain" activity through a smattering of dynamic graphs that cluttered her screen. Right now was a crucial informative phase to—

"How do you feel about murder?" asked Tyrian.

"That's kind of a bad thing, right?"

"Not necessarily~"

"Really?"

"No, it is generally a bad thing," Omsk said, warily eyeing the graphs. "Unless, of course, the person deserves it."

Jaune frowned. "Um, when do they deserve it?"

"If they're a bad person," Omsk said, "and we're fighting against bad people."

"We are?"

"Indeed; in fact, we rescued you from some very evil people just now."

"Oh. Um, thanks!"

"Yes," Tyrian said, "they wanted to suck out your brain!"

"Oh gods!" Jaune threw his hands up to his skull, as if trying to protect it from an imaginary drill and scalpel. "That sounds horrible!"

"You don't even have a brain," Omsk said, "just a sophisticated computer."

"Oh, that's a relief."

"But they did indeed plan to use you for evil," Omsk continued.

"Who's they?"

"The top brass of the Atlas military, of course," Omsk answered him. "Especially General Ironwood. He's working with the other headmasters of the four main schools and various elites in powerful places to try and stage a series of coups and take over the world."

"Whoah."

"Whoah, indeed." Omsk needed to suppress a smirk. "I work in the lab that made you, and so does Doctor Watts—"

"Who's that?"

"The man who made you."

"Oh, so like my dad?"

"Kind of."

"Great! Do I have a mom?"

"Or two dads," Tyrian quipped. "Nowadays, having two dads is the cool thing to do since you're immune to 'your mom' jokes. It's a powerful advantage indeed."

"Cool, do I have two dads?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Aw man…"

"But you don't have a mom either, so I suppose you're still immune to those jokes."

"Awesome!" Jaune fist pumped as if he had just won the local little league game.

"Consider us to be like your family now," Tyrian said with a cutting smile that showed his sharp yellow teeth. "I'm like your uncle, and Omsk here is your babysitter!"

"A babysitter!" Omsk suddenly fumed. "I didn't work for years to graduate top of my class in comp-sci to be—"

"Babysitter, got it!" Jaune said. He leaned over and patted Omsk on the shoulder. "I appreciate it!"

She took a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the moth. Then she sighed heavily and brushed his hand away. This was more difficult than she thought it would be. Or, really, it was more absurd.

"Anyway, we managed to rescue you by briefly hijacking a plane. Also, it should go without saying, but you're not to tell anybody else about all this."

"No, of course not!" Jaune assured. "I'm a spy, after all." He rubbed his hands together. "Am I gonna do spy things? Like get drinks shaken but not stirred?"

"You can if you want, but it's literally impossible for you to get drunk. You have taste buds to register the flavor but everything you eat and drink is dissolved in a little vat of acid."

Jaune raised both fists in the air. "I see this as an absolute win!"

"But you will be expected to go undercover, conduct some espionage and fight."

"Fight? I can do that." Jaune suddenly shot a rapid succession of punches as quickly as a gun could fire bullets. His fists were blurs as he flung out a fury of jabs in a second.

"Perfect!" Tyrian said, raising a fist of his own. "Always go for a left hook to the liver!"

"Got it!" Jaune threw out a nasty left hook in the air, striking an imagined opponent.

"Get the liver!"

"Get the liver!"

Omsk rolled her eyes and spoke in a sarcastic droll. "Yes, get the liver."

"Get the liver!"

"Get the liver!

"Ugh." Omsk checked his diagnostics again, relieved to see that everything was going well. "I trust that you won't be so naïve when we start you on your mission. The fates of many lives will rest on your shoulders." She took offer her big foggy glasses and looked Jaune right in the eye. "Do you understand that?"

"I…" Suddenly, the lackadaisical demeanor that had infected him this whole time faded away. He felt as if gravity had suddenly increased, and now the weight of sudden responsibility upon him.

"I…"

He narrowed his eyes. "I can do it."

Omsk smiled. "Excellent, we can—"

"And if you live for a year, we can have a birthday party!" Tyrian cheered.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, and we'll bake you a cake. It'll be yellow cake and have whipped cream frosting and a little robot drawn on it."

"Whoah, that sounds really cool, thanks!"

Omsk and Tyrian shared a knowing look. They laughed. Without knowing the joke but wanting to share in the merriment, Jaune laughed too.

That ended when a series of heavy knocks emanated from the door.

Tyrian leapt from the truck, brandished his wrist blades and pointed their gun barrels at the door. Jaune also launched himself out of his crate and landed beside Tyrian, deadly fists raised. Meanwhile, Omsk hid behind the crate and covered her head.

Tyrian lowered his weapons when he saw who came through the gate. "Took you long enough!"

"I'm sorry I'm late," Hazel replied, "but I hope you're ready to get going."

"Salutations!" said the bright and excited girl. Her green eyes shone with anticipation under her orange bangs. Penny was proud of herself.

"Who taught you to say that?" asked the dark-skinned and blue-clad girl. Ciel was unimpressed.

The two sat at a simple white table in a simple white bedroom. There were posters on the wall for various recent movies and even one for the Achieve Men, although it had simply been given to Penny by her father because he was under the impression that every teenage girl loved that boy band.

"Let me show you," Penny said. She hopped out of her chair and rooted through the messy pile of papers, books and magazines on her desk until she pulled out a thick book that was probably older than most grandparents. Its spine was so worn as to look like the bottom of an old boot, and each page was as yellow as sandpaper—felt like it too.

Ciel took the book and sighed when she read the faded title. "I don't think that a copy of 'Essential Etiquette for Good Ladies and Gentlemen' that is probably a hundred years old is the best place to look for social advice. Just say hello."

Penny laughed and nervously scratched the side of her head. "Leif and I were a little suspicious, but we decided to trust the book…"

Ciel flipped through the pages and raised her eyebrow at one passage in particular. "Remember the following phrase: if a lady is too fussy with her man, then she is surely to be regarded as a hussy."

"What's a hussy?" Penny asked.

"Certainly not a lady who stands up or herself," Ciel sighed. "Please refrain from reading that thing anymore."

"We only read the first chapter or so."

"Good. Forget everything it told you."

Penny cocked her head to the side. Her green eyes glowed softly for a second. "All my memories about the contents of that book have been successfully deleted!"

Ciel scoffed. "I wish it were that easy for the rest of us—"

Their conversation was broken off when a knock came from the door.

"Come in!"

The door cracked open. The spidery legs of Pietro's chair pressed softly into the room's white carpet as he stepped through. He quickly closed the door behind him.

"Dad?" Penny asked carefully. The downcast look on her father's face worried her. "Is something wrong?"

"Should I leave?" Ciel asked. She placed her hand on the table, ready to push away and exit.

"No, this is something you should know too," Pietro said slowly. He looked down at the floor. While usually he was so jovial that many believed him to have the spirit of a younger man, his voice now sounded old and tired indeed. All of his years showed.

"It's about Leif…" he began.

Is it Leif? Or is it Jaune now? It's Jaune, cus you know, all his memories as Leif kinda got erased. Also threw in a little joking about the color rule, which seems to allow for some real stretches. Once a reviewer for my other story got really mad about me breaking it, tho. And also I did name Omsk after the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Omsk. Why? I dunno, just sorta came to me.